Support Independent Progressive Media, We Need a Build Back Better Climate Bill, Tracking the Far-Right in Bucks County, Reporting on Patriot Front Propaganda in PA, And More!
Independent media hasn’t just recorded history in this country, it has also shaped and made it.
Friday marked my first column with the Bucks County Beacon. I will be writing for them weekly now, and these columns will complement my work for the Bucks County Courier Times and The Intelligencer.
Independent media has had a profound impact on me, not to mention the country - something I elaborate on in the article. I was a college student while participating at the 1999 “Battle of Seattle,” where 80,000+ people from around the world converged on the city for five days to protest the WTO and demand a more humane, just, and sustainable globalization. And it was there that a modern, online Indymedia movement was born which I believe led me to eventually join Upside Down World’s editorial collective in 2005, an award-winning, grassroots, reader-funded online magazine that covered politics and activism in Latin America that I helped grow with co-editors Ben Dangl and April Howard, as well as a community of writers, translators, photographers, editors, and activists from across the hemisphere and around the globe. All I can say is it is good to be back helping build a new project. Please read my piece and lend your support!
This Is What Democracy Looks Like [1999 Seattle WTO Protests]
A documentary shot by over 100 media activists.
Combat the climate crisis before there’s nothing left to build back
“To be blunt, we’re running out of time,” Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania’s Molly Parzen told me. “We’ve already waited too long to act on climate change.”
I spoke with her and local environmental advocate and former state representative Helen Tai for my other column last week where I make the case for a Build Back Better climate bill by showing the horrible state of the environment in Bucks County and Pennsylvania. Read it at the Bucks County Courier Times, The Intelligencer, or free at Yahoo! News.
Tracking Far-Right Activity in Your Community
I am reprinting this excerpt from a recent Ctrl Alt-Right Delete newsletter, which is devoted to covering far-right extremism, white nationalism disinformation, and online toxicity. This is the new normal in Bucks County with groups like Reopen Bucks, Proud American Patriots Network (Three Percent cell), Pennridge for Educational Liberty, Right for Bucks, Patriot Front … and other Republican Party, QAnon, and America First foot soldiers.
PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO CTRL ALT-DELETE HERE!
By Melissa Ryan
I received quite a bit of feedback from last week’s newsletter, Five Ways to Fight Fascism. A few folks wrote in with some of their own suggestions or things y’all are already doing in your communities or things you’d like to happen. But I also received some questions and requests to dig in more on how to document local far-right activity. This week, I’ll expand on that idea further.
First, let’s talk about why it matters. As I wrote earlier this month, the Right is tearing society apart piece by piece, and we’re all living under a constant threat of political violence. They’ve refocused their efforts locally, and we’re seeing it play out in School Board meetings, local elections, threats, intimidation and violence. People on the ground know it’s happening, and there’s local reporting of individual incidents but I’ve yet to see an exhaustive record of far-right activity from one town or county.
Local journalism has been decimated, and the outlets that remain generally do not have the budget for enough reporters or investigative reporting. The Right has used this to their advantage, using local social media community groups to spread fear, disinformation, and conspiracies. They’ve also turned local public meetings into vehicles for their own viral stardom. With these advantages, the Right can dominate the local civic discourse, and heavily influence any national press coverage of a community.
Tracking far-right activity in a community, and making it available to journalists, civic leaders, and activists, is a labor-intensive but simple way to start to push back. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy. A Google doc and/or spreadsheet is an easy way for a couple of people (I wouldn’t attempt something like this alone.) to start. Down the road, you can add things like social media accounts or a website to report what’s happening and start to tell the story of how the far-right is negatively impacting where you live.
A few suggestions of what to track:
Far-Right candidates for elected office
Far-Right elected officials and public officials
Far-Right GOP party officials
Hate groups operating in the area. (SPLC has this information organized by geographic location.)
Hate crimes in the area
Local residents charged in the January 6 coup or other similar charges
Disruption of School Board and other public meetings
Incidents of local activists, teachers, community leaders, and/or residents being targeted with harassment, intimidation, threats, or violence.
I’m barely scratching the surface of what’s possible to collect and how to use the information after it’s compiled. But since this is meant to be a starting-off point rather than a fully formed plan, that’s OK. If you decide to start a tracking project and organize others to join you, let me know how it progresses. I’d love to see this idea take off and see how folks come up with innovative ways to build off of it.
White supremacist group Patriot Front recruiting in Pa., targeting Lancaster County with propaganda
Check out this piece by Lancaster online investigative reporter Carter Walker:
“Pennsylvania, and in particular the state’s southeast, has been a hotbed of activity for Patriot Front, with members reporting more propaganda actions than their counterparts in nearly every other state.
At a 2020 symposium on domestic terrorism in Pittsburgh, FBI supervisory analyst John Pulcastro said the area had become a hub for white supremacists, including Patriot Front.
‘They believe they are being invaded,’ he said of Patriot Front members’ views of non-white immigrants. ‘They are training for an invasion.’”
Finally, two more articles to put on your reading list:
QAnon influencers are urging followers to get involved locally and with school boards by Media Matters